How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking, & More

This can be trickier than just looking at your daily rankings but will give you a better idea of the success of your SEO strategy and how you’re perceived. In 2025, SEO will focus less on raw keywords and more so around search intent across diverse platforms like social media and LLMs. As well as this, it’ll be important to produce more video content as discovery platforms integrate these more into their SERPs.

• A better approach is to create content that has depth and covers a topic completely.
• The session duration shows how long users stay on YouTube after watching a video.
• At Digital Sprout, we specialize in providing customized SEO solutions for businesses in Maryland and beyond.
• First, you’ll need to distribute your business listings to all the top online directories.

Which Local SEO Ranking Factors Does Google Care About?

The result uses an authoritative tone plus leverages the optimization listed below (data points). Upload content to an LLM, whether Gemini or ChatGPT, to determine how well it understands your content. Alternatively, use another Google Labs experiment, SGE while browsing, to see what Google views as the most important points.

Importance of High-Quality Content in Organic Search Traffic

Did you know that nearly 60% of the sites with a top ten Google search ranking are three or more years old? Data from an Ahrefs study of two million pages suggests fewer sites than a year old achieve that ranking. Google’s mobile-first index is now a reality, which means it’s drawing its results from mobile-optimized sites first rather than sites geared to desktop computers. If your site is mobile-optimized, you can avoid getting needlessly under-ranked. With years of experience in both SEO and digital marketing, Steve Wiideman is a trusted pro in his field.

These numerical factors are in some senses “better” for studies using correlation calculations such as Spearman, with rows and / or ranking principles based on gradations. When it comes to interpretations based on the pure correlation value alone, the statements for numeric factors are often more significant. Elements that are described using binary factors – such as a meta description on the page – are either present or not. There are also elements with graded characteristics that change in differing degrees.

Google’s approach to AI-generated content is rooted in its commitment to rewarding high-quality, original content, irrespective of how it’s produced. The key criteria for content evaluation remain centered around the principles of expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Google emphasizes the importance of content quality over the method of creation, whether it’s AI-generated or human-written. The focus is on delivering reliable, high-quality search results to users, which has guided Google’s content policies for years.

Google trusts sites with a valid SSL certificate more than those that don’t. You need to improve your overall SEO performance, especially strengthen your backlink profile, to increase your authority. The best way to do that is to use a detailed SEO checklist that covers all aspects of SEO. Luckily for you, we have already created an ultimate SEO checklist that you can simply download and start using. However, if you want the complete list of 200 Google ranking factors, you can skip to SEO Anomaly the next section. At least, these 200 ranking factors are the ones we know of and Google may be using a lot more.